Saturday, February 10, 2018

#52books The Phoenix Project

It’s a luxury to sit and consume a book in one sitting. Having the time to do that is half of it. Finding a book you can’t put down is the other.

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford use storytelling to share a way to think about DevOps and IT as a key business driver.

They have obviously spent time in the trenches. The stories ring true, the characters seem to be modeled after people they have encountered, and I get the sense that some of the situations are thin disguises for real-life episodes. Admittedly, they also try to cram those characters into typical IT and corporate stereotypes (the guru/mentor, the politician, the “CEO,” the savior engineer, etc). They also follow the hero’s journey as the framework, so you pretty much knew how things were going to end.

Thankfully, I was not reading this as a novel or expecting much of a plot.

I could have easily read the back of the book and get what I needed out of it.

Reading the whole book, however, helped to provide context to the ideas in the back of the book.

I also found myself going on the learning journey with Bill, the main character, as he tried to parse what Erik, the guru/mentor, told him.

It’s impressive when a book gets my attention enough to make me engage like that.

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